Singapore is well-known for being the most attractive nation for FinTech development and one of the strong contributing factors is our city-state’s progressive regulatory support. Anticipating that regulators will continue to tighten the regulatory requirements in this sector, global economy and financial services have begun to automate and digitise manual work processes in their business operation, including e-KYC and compliance services, to help them stay competitive in the industry.
As the global economy and financial services gets increasingly digitised, robust digital solutions such as e-KYC and compliance services have become a must-have instead of a good-to-have in this day and age. This brings us to yesterday’s webinar where Chye Kit, alongside with other 2 guest speakers, deep dived into the key topic of how Regulatory Technology (RegTech) has played a critical role in today’s development of financial markets.
A high-level understanding on KYC/AML to think about
There are 4 questions to address when conducting KYC/AML on the other party.
Who are they? This signifies that you know who are the customers/suppliers that you are dealing with by proving and verifying their identity.
Who are they not? This suggests that you do not want to deal with high-risk individuals or companies that are listed in the sanction list. At the same time, carefully evaluate if you want to deal with individuals or companies coming from a high-risk country or individuals flagged as a Politically Exposed Person (PEP).
Are they still who they say they are? This indicates that you conduct ongoing due-diligence on individuals and/or companies that you are dealing with.
What did they do? This addresses the final portion of the KYC process where you evaluate transactions conducted by the people/companies you are dealing with - applicable to transactions made in both real and virtual worlds.
At Cynopsis Solutions, our end-to-end solutions, Ares (Digital Onboarding), Artemis (E-KYC) and Athena (Real-Time Transaction Monitoring) were built to help our global clients address these questions in their entire compliance and regulatory process.
Understanding what regulations are needed to be addressed before applying the appropriate RegTech solutions to it.
When prompted which RegTech is being widely utilised and highly leveraged at the moment, Chye Kit responded that regulated entities have to understand which regulations are needed to be addressed before choosing the appropriate technology or solutions to it.
For instance, FinTech industry players will have to ensure that they know who they are dealing with, and authenticate the clients that they are dealing with. In such a scenario, digital onboarding solutions will be applicable. Likewise for many other regulated entities, apart from just verifying and authenticating the people they are dealing with, ongoing due-diligence is also mandatory, hence, e-KYC solutions and the technology it brings along would be widely used in these sectors.
Striking a balance between robustness of solutions and users’ experience.
Despite having a negative correlation, robustness of solutions and users’ experience should not be compromised as they are equally important. The robustness of any solution is definitely an area where RegTech solutions providers have to place emphasis on since we are dealing with a lot of Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Ensuring proper and secured storage of client’s personal information should be one of the many top concerns of all RegTech solutions providers. At Cynopsis, we adopt AWS cloud infrastructure and use segregated instances to ensure that our clients’ data is safe and secured in their own unique instances. On top of that we are also ISO 27001 certified, ensuring our clients that our information security is at a top-notch level.
Before the 1-hour webinar came to a closure, Chye Kit had provided some key takeaways for the audiences. Firstly, he emphasised that regulations are here to stay. This is especially more so for those who are in the FinTech and Financial Institutions sectors as RegTech is now a must-have and hence RegTech is here to stay as well. Second and lastly, Chye Kit also highlighted that no one single solution can solve the current regulatory problems in this complex world of regulation. Instead, it is an iterative process where there is a constant need for firms to catch up and stay ahead of the regulatory curve, which would bring them regulatory advantage.
About Cynopsis Solutions
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Singapore, Cynopsis Solutions offers RegTech solutions designed to digitise and automate Compliance and regulatory processes, in particular know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, and counter-terrorism financing. Cynopsis Solutions’ accolades include MAS FinTech Awards (2018), RegTech100 (2018, 2019) and Financial Times Top 50 High Growth Companies in Asia-Pacific.
Our end-to-end KYC/AML solutions are designed according to the global FATF recommendations, applicable to more than 180 jurisdictions and is already helping more than a thousand B2B customers in the Banking, Financial Services, FinTech and Cryptocurrency, Professional Services and Gaming sectors globally.
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